The State of Online Forms

Nearly half of new forms are now built with AI

When we started tracking AI-built forms in May 2025, 34% of new forms were built with AI. By August 2026 that had reached 45%, and the first few days of September were already at 47%.

The line is not a straight climb. The share fell to 32% in February, then climbed back from April onwards. Counting people rather than forms shows the same move: 35% of builders used AI in May 2025, and 48% did in August 2026.

The takeaway: starting a form with a prompt is no longer the unusual route. It is close to being the default one.

AI editing grew 2.5x in six months

Editing an existing form with AI shipped in February 2026. In that first month, 4.3% of published forms had at least one AI edit. By August the figure was 10.6%, and it rose in five of the six months after launch.

The creation number gets the attention, but this one says more about habit. People are coming back to forms they already built and asking AI to change them.

The takeaway: AI is not only a way to get a first draft. It is becoming part of how a form gets maintained.

People are getting the same result from much shorter prompts

Prompts got longer for most of the period. The median was 281 characters in October 2025, about 50 words. By May 2026 it had grown to 835 characters, roughly 150 words. It held above 600 through July.

Then it dropped to 316 characters in August, 62% shorter than the May peak. Part of that is the new builder, which launched in August with suggested prompts, so a form can start from a few words or a single click. Better models needing less instruction is a fair reading of the rest.

The takeaway: the effort of describing a form is falling. People type less and still get a usable draft.

Starting with AI gets a form live 3 minutes faster

The median new user publishes a first form 12 minutes after signing up, and that figure has sat between 12 and 15 minutes every month since October 2025. It has not fallen over the year.

The starting point is what changes the number. Users whose first form comes from AI publish in 12 minutes. Users who open a blank builder take 15, and users who import a Google Form take 16.

The takeaway: AI shortens the gap between signing up and having something live, by about a fifth.

Agent activity grew 9x from July to August

Three organizations ran 9 operations in June. Ten ran 97 in July. Twenty-six ran 838 in August, and the first three days of September had already produced 357.

These are early numbers on a small base, so the percentage growth matters less than the direction. An organization that connects an agent does not use it once.

Agents are taking actions, not just reading data

The largest slice manages files and media on forms. One in five operations builds or edits a form, and almost as many read or update submissions. Checking on a running job accounts for another fifth, which is what long tasks look like from the inside.

The most common first move is listing the forms in an account. Nineteen of the 34 organizations started there.

The takeaway: agents are past the chat window. They are working inside the tools people already pay for.

ChatGPT is far ahead of every other AI tool

ChatGPT had 52 organizations in the quarter. Claude had 4 and Claude Code 3, with 1 each for Cursor and Antigravity. That puts ChatGPT at almost 6x every other tool combined.

Of the 34 organizations that ran an agent, 20 connected through an app login and 2 used an API key.

The takeaway: for now, supporting one assistant well covers most of the demand.

Registration, contact, quizzes and surveys make up 59% of forms

Registration and sign-up is the biggest single job at 19%, followed by contact at 16%, quizzes at 14% and surveys at 11%. Applications, orders and bookings, support requests and feedback take most of the rest.

Consent forms, intake forms and lead capture each sit at 3% to 4%. Small shares, but each one is a real workflow with its own rules about what has to be captured.

The takeaway: the need behind a form has not changed. Someone has to collect information from someone else, in a way both sides can rely on.

Education builds more forms than any other industry

Education leads at 16%, then events at 15%, fitness and sports at 11% and retail at 10%. Agencies, HR teams and healthcare follow. Sixteen industries show up in the data, and the smallest of them still runs into the dozens of forms.

The most common industry and use case pairings:

• Events and registration: 325 forms, the single biggest pairing in the set
• Retail and orders: 165 forms
• Education and quizzes: 123 forms
• Education and registration: 105 forms

1 in 4 forms is built in a language other than English

A quarter of the forms in the dataset are not in English, and that share has been flat across four quarters rather than rising. The largest languages after English are Portuguese, German, French and Spanish, with Arabic and Indonesian close behind.

AI prompts lean further from English than the forms do. Around half use a non-Latin script, which means people describe the form in their own language and get a form back in it.

The takeaway: multilingual is not an edge case to plan for later. It is a quarter of the current dataset.

Finance leads AI adoption at 72%, retail sits at 25%

Finance and insurance top the list at 72%. Healthcare follows at 69%, education at 63% and HR at 56%. Retail, events, real estate and fitness all sit below a third.

The industries above the line share a trait: their forms tend to be long, structured and full of questions that have to be worded carefully.

The more questions a form needs, the more likely AI writes it

Intake and onboarding forms are AI-built 67% of the time. Quizzes reach 63%, surveys 62% and feedback forms 61%. Contact forms, event forms and consent forms all fall below a third.

A contact form is four fields that anyone can type out. A 40-question intake form is an afternoon. That gap is what the chart is measuring.

The takeaway: AI gets used where the form is expensive to write by hand, not where it is quick.

Form creation grew for five months straight after the April low

People created 51,000 forms on Formester in these 11 months. Monthly creation fell through the winter and bottomed at 3,200 forms in April, then rose every month to 5,100 in August, a 63% recovery.

August also brought 3,300 new accounts, the second highest month for signups in the period.

People who use AI do more of everything else too

From April to early September, 2,471 builders used AI at least once and 4,097 did not. The AI group built 75% more forms per person, published a little more often, and bought a paid plan at a higher rate.

This is a correlation in one product's data, not proof that AI causes the difference. The people who reach for a new feature are often the more motivated ones to begin with.